Affiliate Programs as a Solution to Working from Home

Many people dream of being able to work from home, be their own boss, dictate their own hours

and say goodbye to the daily grind of the commute and office politics.

By far the best and easiest way to work from home is to join one or more affiliate programs. As an

affiliate you will be your own boss, you will set your own hours, and the money you earn will be

determined only by your own efforts.

Affiliate programs allow you to make money from other people’s products or services without

having to supply that service yourself or hold any stock, etc. You simply introduce the product or

service to the person interested in using that product or service.

This is done online, typically through visitors coming to your website. So you will need to be able

to build a website, which is easily done with software like Dreamweaver, or a free alternative like

Kompozer, which makes building a website as easy as using a word processor.

You build your website around the keyword that you want to rank highly for in the search engines

and which is related to the affiliate program you are promoting. You then use PPC (pay per click

marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization) to drive traffic to your website based on the

keywords that you are promoting and which are relevant to your affiliate program.

Affiliate programs based on websites generally run themselves after the website is built and

optimized. After that you simply use your experience to join another program, build another

website based round it and make more money. This is called scaling. You can scale up as much as

you like. You may at some stage take on employees or virtual assistants to do specific tasks.

Eventually you will end up with a recognizable business, if that’s what you want. But if you don’t

want that, it’s okay too; it’s entirely up to you how big you want to take things.

Your affiliate program will pay you on a per click basis, a per lead basis, or a per sale basis,

depending on the nature of the program. Pay per lead and pay per click are known as CPA (cost

per action or cost per acquisition) affiliate programs, which means that you do not need to make

a sale in order to be paid your commission.

Most affiliate networks pay their affiliates monthly, although there are some that pay every two

weeks and some that pay every week. A small number of CPA affiliate networks actually pay their

affiliate daily on the basis of commission earned and validated on previous days. The affiliate

network which you join will have its own rules on how often they will pay you, and a threshold of

payment, below which no payment will be made in a particular month. Most networks will pay by

check or bank draft, and in some cases payment may be made into Paypal accounts. You need to

check on the affiliate network’s specific procedures on payment methods, frequency and

thresholds.

The network will also have its own monitoring software for accurate tracking of the earnings of

their members. There are a number of proprietary tracking systems available and some will have

their own in-house tracking systems available. All affiliates will their own tracking code which is

specific to them and only them, in order that they earnings can be calculated and apportioned to

the individual involved.